Saturday, July 2, 2011

About software projects

The fundamental assumption underlying all software projects is that software is easy to change.If you violate this assumption by creating inflexible structures, then you undercut the economic model that the entire industry is based on.

Professionals spend time caring for their profession.

You should plan on working 60 hours per week. The first 40 are for your employer. The remaining 20 are for you. During this remaining 20 hours you should be reading, practicing, learning, and otherwise enhancing your career.

Presumably you became a software developer because you are passionate about software and your desire to be a professional is motivated by that passion. During that 20 hours you should be doing those things that reinforce that passion. Those 20 hours should be fun!

Professionals practice.

True professionals work hard to keep their skills sharp and ready. It is not enough to simply do your daily job and call that practice. Doing your daily job is performance, not practice. Practice is when you specifically exercise your skills outside of the performance of your job for the sole purpose of refining and enhancing those skills.

Team Player

We’ve all heard how important it is to be a “team player.” Being a team player means playing your position as well as you possibly can, and helping out your teammates when they get into a jam. A team-player communicates frequently, keeps an eye out for his or her teammates, and executes his or her own responsibilities as well as possible.

Test Automation Pyramid

The kinds of tests that a professional development organization needs are:

Unit Tests

At the bottom of the pyramid are the unit tests. These tests are written by programmers, for programmers, in the programming language of the system.The intent of these tests is to specify the system at the lowest level. Developers write these tests before writing production code as a way to specify what they are about to write. They are executed as part of Continuous Integration to ensure that the intent of the programmers’ is upheld.

Component Tests

Generally they are written against individual components of the system. The components of the system encapsulate the business rules, so the tests for those components are the acceptance tests for those business rules. It passes input data into the component and gathers output data from it. It tests that the output matches the input. Any other system components are decoupled from the test using appropriate mocking and test-doubling techniques.

Component tests cover roughly half the system. They are directed more towards happy-path situations and very obvious corner, boundary, and alternate-path cases. The vast majority of unhappy-path cases are covered by unit tests and are meaningless at the level of component tests

Integration Tests

These tests only have meaning for larger systems that have many components. These tests assemble groups of components and test how well they communicate with each other. The other components of thesystem are decoupled as usual with appropriate mocks and test-doubles.

Integration tests are choreography tests. They do not test business rules. Rather, they test how well the assembly of components dances together. They are plumbing tests that make sure that the components are properly connected and can clearly communicate with each other.

System Tests

These are automated tests that execute against the entire integrated system. They are the ultimate integration tests. They do not test business rules directly. Rather, they test that the system has been wired together correctly and its parts interoperate according to plan. We would expect to see throughput and performance tests in this suite.

Manual Exploratory Tests

This is where humans put their hands on the keyboards and their eyes on the screens. These tests are not automated, nor are they scripted. The intent of these tests is to explore the system for unexpected behaviors while confirming expected behaviors. Toward that end we need human brains, with human creativity, working to investigate and explore the system. Creating a written test plan for this kind of testing defeats the purpose.